Slashdot Mirror
Slackware 11.0 Almost Done
linuxbeta writes "DistroWatch reports that the development process for Slackware Linux 11.0 is almost over. OSDir has some sweet shots of Slackware 11.0 RC1 in the Slackware 11.0 RC1 Screenshot Tour." From the article: "'There are still a few changes yet to happen, but let's call this Slackware 11.0 release candidate 1.' Other recent changes include upgrade to stable kernel 2.4.33; upgrade to udev 097, and rebuild of glibc 2.3.6 for both 2.4.33 and 2.6.16.27 kernels. The new release will ship with X.Org 6.9.0 and KDE 3.5.4, and will provide SeaMonkey instead of Mozilla."
Slackware's always been designed with maximum stability and reliability in mind. Patrick thinks that 2.4 is still the safer bet, so he's gone with it as a default. The option to install with a new 2.6 kernel is also available, for those who'd prefer something a touch more modern.
2.4 is old but by no means 'dated'. 2.4 is significantly leaner than 2.6, runs on old hardware and has a lot of backports from 2.6 http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ChangeLog- 2.4.33
Even DSL uses 2.4. I still use 2.4 on my old PIIs and newer hardware myself.
Slack aims to run on as many types of hardware as possible. Besides, you can always compile your own 2.6 kernel into your slack system.
... for its venerability as well as its stability. It was my first, and still favourite distribution. It's not on the bleeding edge, but it has other virtues. One is that it can be scaled easily to install as much or as little of it as you need, and run on machines with very different CPU and memory resources and amounts of disk space. Great for turning a bunch of old mismatched PCs into a Beowulf Cluster.
Semi-automatic package management has taken awhile to evolve, but for some time now it has been very good indeed. There are several good PM clients; I think slapt-get has the edge right now. And if you can't find what you need in the distro, there are several sites (such as http://www.linuxpackages.net/) that offer lots of additional packages and goodies.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Argh... don't make assumptions.
/usr, and will break many apps. The distros that adopted 7.0 so fast were foolish and likely caused problems for their end users. So when you call Xorg 6.9 so old, you are so wrong. Xorg 6.9 and Xorg 7.0 are essentially the same code and released the same time.
Xorg 6.9 and Xorg 7.0 are functionally the same. The only difference is installation methods in that 7.0 is modular, puts things in
I'm not going to detail the other things people have done, but I will also state, that slackware has supported 2.6 for a long time now. Not only that, I've been running it with 2.5/2.6 since about 2003.
I tried using the bundled 2.6 once, and I encountered some problems. I ended up getting the vanilla source from kernel.org and it actually worked better.
What are you talking about? Slackware is the only high-profile distro that uses Linus' tree. It's all the other distros that patch the kernel. Slackware doesn't.
Nothing is wrong with 2.6, but for some of us having the 2.4 option is essential. For example, certain applications built for 2.4 LinuxThreads will tend to be very unstable running on the new POSIX threads in 2.6.
People are looking at this the wrong way. It's not that Slackware doen't included the 2.6 kernel (it does), it offers the versatility to run either 2.4 or 2.6 which is a major advantage over other distros. Especially for us poor bastards who have to run expensive closed-source proprietary software at work.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U